


take a deep breath

by mistyheartrbs



Category: Love Live! Sunshine!!
Genre: Basically, Canon Compliant, F/F, Helicopters, Mutual Pining, Teen Angst, but it gets resolved!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28361418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistyheartrbs/pseuds/mistyheartrbs
Summary: Kanan and Mari go for a helicopter ride. It's not quite as idyllic as it sounds.
Relationships: Matsuura Kanan/Ohara Mari
Kudos: 11





	take a deep breath

**Author's Note:**

> i ended up having such intense distaste for the nijigasaki anime that i just ended up with more appreciation for lls, particularly chikariko and kanamari. so this happened.

Kanan Matsuura, jock extraordinaire and licensed diver, was not afraid of heights.

Of course she wasn’t. That would be ridiculous, and nonsensical, and would be a point of weakness, and she didn’t have those.

So the reason why she was clinging to Mari was just that she wanted to, not that the wide expanse of ocean below her was the scariest thing she had ever seen. 

_Beautiful, right?_ Mari mouthed, in English, and Kanan had to hold back a laugh at the fact that she realized that she could read her lips, even in another language, even thousands of feet in the air like this. The woman was nothing if not a professional, and she’d been making a point not to look at Kanan for more than a few seconds so as not to lose sight of the sky. 

***

“You really learned how to fly these?” Kanan asked, in awe, when they were hiding out from the rest of the group after a particularly long practice, when they were sitting on Mari’s balcony with a clear view of her entire estate, rented helicopter included. 

“I did,” Mari said, glancing over at her with her arms folded over the railing. “Took it up as a hobby - just got my license, since I had to wait until I turned eighteen, but I’ve known for quite a while. There’s not so much to do in America, when you get down to it!” She laughed at that last part, like she’d just made a tremendous joke, and Kanan gripped the rail tighter. 

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. How many more times, she thought, would they go through this? Sometimes she thought they would never get out of the shadow that those two years had cast over them. They were both (legally) adults, they both knew that dwelling over the past did nothing, but sometimes the guilt crushed Kanan like a boulder and she felt like she couldn’t breathe and it was something she could never, _ever_ tell Mari, so there was that.

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Mari closed her eyes and breathed in the ocean. She looked like a movie star, dress billowing in the sea breeze, the wind teasing the hair away from her neck. “But you’re changing the subject, dear Kanan. Could it be that you’re still afraid of heights, even after all of this time?”

“What?!” Kanan sputtered, the moment definitively gone. “No!”

“Does the chopper terrify you?” Mari looked like the cat that had caught the canary. Kanan felt like a lovestruck canary.

“Of course not,” Kanan scoffed. “Things change, you know. I’m…we’re older now.” 

“Hmm, no shame in it if you’re not.” Mari flipped around, leaned on the railing. It was a testament to her trust in the building; Kanan would have worried about the rails creaking beneath two teenagers - they could both still claim that title for another year and a half - but Mari didn’t seem worried at all. 

“I’m not!” 

“Tell yourself that enough, darling Kanan, and perhaps it will be true.” When had they ended up like this? Some part of Kanan still feared that Mari would take that helicopter and leave them all behind again, even when every practical part of her screamed that she was the one who had sent her away in the first place.

“What if we went flying tomorrow?” Kanan challenged. Mari blinked. A surprise. Something unexpected in their usual dance. She quickly relaxed back into the trickster, but Kanan saw it.

“I don’t see why not.” Mari gazed out at the endless blue expanse, the horizon brushed up against the waves. “We can hardly make school idoldom our entire lives, now can we? We’ve got to have fun once in a while, too.” 

***

So that was how she’d ended up here, in a wobbly little death trap with her ex-ex-best friend, wondering if this could lead to something more and also knowing that this was the worst possible time to be thinking about that. 

“It’s so _empowering_ to be up here,” Mari sighed loudly, trademark hair loopy forgone for the sake of bulky hot-pink headphones. Kanan wondered how she picked her English words. How many women’s seminars had she attended, during those two years? “Anyone below would see us so high above them, like gods! Like the most powerful things in the world. And they’re all just specks below us.” 

Kanan chanced a look at said specks - a handful of fishermen in a dinky little boat - and just as quickly drew herself back, trying not to hold Mari too close. Far be it from her to distract the pilot with her dumb fears, or her yearning, or some combination of the two. 

“Great,” she said, trying to steady her breathing. 

“What?” Mari yelled, pointing to the headphones. 

“Nothing!” Kanan yelled back. 

“We ought to turn around, oughtn’t we?” Mari gave a little sigh. “It’s always the hardest part, the landing.”

“Is there a chance you _can’t land?!”_ Kanan yelped. What a way to go this would be, undone by her own bravado. Mari shook her head, almost condescending but not quite.

“It’s just so difficult to relinquish it,” she explained, and Kanan could hear her straining her voice a little. She briefly wondered how they would explain this to the others in practice tomorrow. “The power, the freedom. The engine and the blades drowning out all of your thoughts. It’s transcendent.”

“Oh.” 

“But I won’t keep on torturing you, Kanan.” Mari turned it around, took a deep breath. Kanan wondered if altitude could mess with your breathing this much or if that was just both of them being dramatic, still just kids regardless of whether or not they were about to graduate or could pilot horrible mechanical birds or anything else. 

“It’s fine!” Kanan never wanted to see her make that expression, never wanted to be the source of suffering ever again. Mari shrugged, helplessly. 

“You’ve got such a terrible poker face,” she said. “I’m not quite sure how I was ever naive enough to take your ankle at face value.”

 _Are we going to keep torturing each other like this forever?_ Kanan wanted to say, but instead she said nothing, because it was too loud for something quiet like that, and besides she wasn’t cruel. Neither of them were, not really. Just hung up on the past, trying to square it with the future, shepherding a bunch of earnest lesbians around a hopeless endeavor to save their school.

***

Kanan knew for a fact that the Ohara estate was private, which was why it baffled her that the fountain was full of coins, like the passerby had idly tossed them in on a whim, making a fun little wish or hoping for a divine force within the stone and marble to throw them a bone. Had Mari put all of them there? Had it been the work of some gardener, meticulously putting the coins in as a means to make the place look more lived-in? Had the handful of times the rest of Aquors had come here added up so significantly that the floor of the fountain was now tiled with coins upon coins?

“Who put the coins here?” she finally asked, after they’d sat on its rim in awkward silence for a few minutes, the helicopter safely sitting on its pad. Mari looked behind her, as if checking to confirm. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “They might’ve come with it.”

“Ah.” More silence. Any belief that they’d just go on like it had been after that night - the storm, the slap, the hug, forgiveness seeping through each other’s shirts and mixing with the tears and rain and snot - was one that had quickly been undone by the announcement of Uranohoshi’s closure, but this still stung. 

“I suppose that answers my question, though.” Mari smirked. “Some things never change, hmm? Diver of the year Kanan Matsuura still can’t go above the ocean.”

“It doesn’t scare _you?_ Being so far above everything and everyone else?”

“I take my moments where I can get them. And I would think that being underwater would be scarier - at least you can _breathe_ in the sky.”

Kanan thought, then, of the blue water cushioning her, pushing her upwards, and how she made room for herself in there. 

“I guess we’re just different,” she said. Mari looked at her, then, and rested a hand on her thigh. Kanan gulped, shuddered a little. The beach gave everyone sun. Nobody would notice it, if her cheeks were redder than usual.

“Of course we are, silly. But we’re still together, aren’t we?” Mari beamed. Kanan’s heart stopped, kicked itself back into gear at the last second. “Aquors.”

“Right. Aquors. Of course.” Kanan shook her head. Mari hadn’t moved her hand. Kanan wondered if it’d fallen asleep.

“I missed this.” Mari leaned forward, a tiny bit, a movement so miniscule that someone - anyone - else wouldn’t have caught it at all. “You.” Kanan took another deep breath. Her atoms rearranged themselves.

“Me too.” Kanan moved closer, every groove of the fountain’s imperfect stone rubbing her legs. The whiplash of the conversation was making her dizzy, or maybe that was left over from the helicopter, or maybe that was the proximity to Mari. 

“This is going to change us, won’t it?” she said, posing it like a question, but both of them knew the answer, had known it years and years ago. It was terrifying and it wasn’t frightening in the slightest. It was a tidal wave, rising to meet the sky.

Kanan closed her eyes and let the air fill her lungs.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know much about helicopters so apologies if any of this is wrong


End file.
